TEXT 1, Il restera la gravité (context)
My family history has meant that, since childhood, I have had only objects and stories through which to access an entire part of my past. It was through them that I spontaneously questioned the emotional relationship we have with the objects around us. As in my work Bijou Bougie, 2012, made during my studies, it is often through the erasure and destruction of objects that I have questioned this relationship.
In 2021, I discovered a family history that had remained unspoken for eighty years. The historians Patricia Helletzgruber and Sophie Juliard contacted me in succession about the paintings looted from the studio of my grandmother, the painter Diane Esmond, during the Second World War. I then learned that the looting concerned not only forty-six paintings, but also the entire contents of my great-grandparents’ and grandparents’ apartments. I also learned that the services that had requisitioned the family building, located at 54 avenue d’Iéna in Paris, were none other than the ERR (responsible for the looting of works of art) itself, followed by the Comité d’organisation des entreprises de déménagement et de garde-meubles, responsible for the mass looting of everyday objects during the Occupation. In Paris, 38,000 apartments were emptied.
The archives I discovered gave me access to the long lists of objects, works of art and books claimed by my grandparents and great-grandparents at the end of the war. From memory, they named each of the missing objects and described their shapes, materials and colours as precisely as possible, in the hope of having them returned. Their apartments had been stripped bare: no more furniture, no more tapestries, no more piano, no more “piano cover in dove-coloured velvet,” nor any “small English silver tea service with kettle.”
According to the notes of Rose Valland and the ERR, most of Diane Esmond’s paintings were burned in front of the Jeu de Paume in 1943. Diane would say nothing about this looting to her children.
This history of looting and its repression deeply affected me. Thanks to the CNAP research and creation grant (2022), I pursued my research further and created a body of works in dialogue with my grandmother’s history.
During a trip to New York in 2023, the city where my family went into exile during the war, I visited my uncle, Diane Esmond’s son, who has preserved her work since her death. I was deeply moved by the discovery of this work and fascinated by its scope and quality. After the canvases that had been stolen or destroyed, I found myself faced with hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings, made in Paris and now piled up in Boston, at the back of a cellar. This is how the idea arose of bringing back dozens of paintings and drawings by this grandmother I never knew, and incorporating a selection of them into my own project.
— Adrianna Wallis
TEXT 2, Diane Esmond (historical fiction)
“ I don’t read biographies. They are full of lies because they say that truth has a beginning, a middle and an end.”
Nico, Cible Mouvante (excerpt from Nico qui a peur d’être dans le noir, Clémentine Boulard, 2025)
“Diana never talked to me about her work / Diane never spoke to me about her work.” These are the opening words of Martha Gellhorn in a text written in June 1995. Fourteen years after Diane Esmond’s death. Three years before the great war correspondent, upon learning that she had cancer that would eat away at her body and mind, swallowed a cyanide capsule and chose her own end. 1998, the year I was born.
This text, entitled “Remembering Diana,” was written by Martha Gellhorn at the request of her godson, Victor Wallis, Diane Esmond’s eldest son. Victor sent it to me as part of the investigation I am conducting into his mother alongside the artist Adrianna Wallis, Diane Esmond’s granddaughter. These few pages, written in tribute to the painter, came into my possession three years after the research began. Three years of adventures, discoveries and twists and turns during which I developed a passion for Diane, but at the end of which a frustration remained. Of all the documents that had passed through my hands, of all the testimonies I had gathered, I had still not managed to find a satisfactory answer to the question that had sparked my interest from the outset: Who was Diane Esmond?
The year 2020 is drawing to a close. I have just met Adrianna Wallis at the Archives Nationales in Paris, for the Nuit de la Lecture. She is presenting a performance there as part of her work Les lettres ordinaires, a project that questions what happens to lost letters, those letters that are posted but never reach their recipient. I suggest interviewing her. What place has art had in your life? is my first question. Adrianna tells me that, as a child, she grew up amid the mountains of the Vercors in a house whose walls were dotted with silent paintings. Her grandmother, whom she never knew because she died ten days before Adrianna was born, had painted them.
A few days later, Adrianna writes to me in the postscript of an email that she has been thinking again about our conversation. Perhaps it would be interesting to look into the life of this grandmother, Diane Esmond? I encourage her to do so. There is nothing better than a mystery to solve. Would you like to follow this story with me? she asks. That is all it takes for me to come aboard.
A second email follows: “I told my uncle Victor that we had something in mind about Diane. He is delighted. He had sent me this fragment of a letter, written by Diane, in case it might inspire me. In the meantime, he has lost it. He kept all the letters his mother wrote to him. Apparently, this is the one in which she speaks most about her work.”
Attached is a sheet of sky-blue paper, written on in navy-blue ink, beginning with a sentence: “‘Hope’ is what keeps us alive and keeps us going. Never let it leave your side / ‘Hope’ is what keeps us alive and allows us to keep moving forward. Never let it abandon you.” It is clearly the middle page of a three-part letter. This fragment does not begin with “My dear…” and does not end with “Love.” It tells the story of an impulse, that of an artist ready to create. Diane has just arrived in a small, hidden village in Italy, built on a rock near Naples. She had to leave, leave Paris, change what lay before her eyes. She is there, So here I am, alone, alone. She must set to work, which will be difficult for her. She has thrown herself into a new world, where she will have to face herself and make the most of it. She arrived the previous evening. She does not know what awaits her. All she knows is that it will be difficult. Her work will not depend on what she sees, but on what she is. She has lived through this situation many times. She knows it by heart, since it never changes and repeats itself. She knows what feelings stand in her way. Hope and despair, passion and hatred, will tear each other apart within her until she manages to tame them in order to accomplish what, in her view, is worthwhile. She has never admitted defeat to herself; she could not bear it. In Haiti, she had almost given in.
These words, with neither beginning nor end, were my first encounter with her. Before seeing her painting. Before knowing what she looked like. It was while reading this fragment that, open-mouthed, the question formed in my mind of who had spoken these words so charged with truth. I needed to know. Tirelessly, I tried to understand.
Later, after discovering Martha Gellhorn’s presence in Diane’s life, I contacted one of her biographers. Perhaps she had heard of the painter in the journalist’s life. And then I could not help slipping in an additional question. What would be the best advice you would give to a young writer who wants to portray an artist? She replied with this simple sentence: “The key lies in thorough research, until there is nothing left to discover.” The problem with research is that it never ends, I replied. Her conclusion was unequivocal: “Yes, it seems that it does have an end.” At that moment, Martha Gellhorn’s text reached me, and with it an answer to my question. Who was Diane Esmond?
Diane Esmond was someone who did not talk about her work. Diane Esmond was relentless. Diane Esmond painted. Only one of her closest friends could possess the necessary accuracy to define her, before anything else.
— Eloïse Duguay
TEXT 3, Il restera la gravité (historical background)
In the spring of 1942, a German agency, the Dienststelle Westen, set up its offices in a private mansion at 54 avenue d’Iéna, in the 16th arrondissement. Owned by a Jewish family—that of Diane Esmond, a painter and Adrianna Wallis’s grandmother—the building already housed the team responsible for seizing works of art belonging to Jewish collectors. Until August 1944, in the capital, the Dienststelle Westen, with the support of French removal companies, would completely empty nearly 40,000 apartments whose legal tenants, Jews who had been arrested or had fled, were physically absent.
This “Furniture Operation,” as those who carried it out called it, affected the entire city: from the affluent homes of the western districts to the far more numerous and infinitely more modest homes of eastern Paris. On rue Chapon alone, at least 50 homes, including one at number six, where you are now, were completely looted: from light bulbs to curtains, as well as stools, teaspoons and other books.
This account by the historian that I am attests to the scale of the crime. It does not allow us to imagine the feeling of intimate erasure and inner violation that resulted from this intrusion into the homes of those who were its victims. Adrianna Wallis’s visual poetry, for its part, draws on a family experience long forgotten to reveal this loss. She works with appearance as a material, within the fold of disappearance and in an imaginary dialogue with Georges Perec, who walked the streets of Paris as so many paths of memory.
At the Liberation, the survivors had to make lists, from memory, of what had been stolen from them. Thousands of handwritten pages are now preserved in the archives. Adrianna Wallis makes them resonate by reproducing excerpts, transformed into lines of poetry, alongside original works, illuminated by those of her grandmother. A dialogue thus takes shape between places, periods and, above all, artistic forms. “A white tablecloth decorated with openwork” is mentioned in one of the inventories, repainted by hand in gouache on art paper. It is the “openwork” rather than the “tablecloth” that these works allow us to see, like so many holes in memory that only the artist’s gesture can make appear, without filling them in, as though suspended. Despite gravity.
— Sarah Gensburger, sociologist of memory and CNRS researcher
TEXT 4 (about Adrianna Wallis)
What moves me in Adrianna Wallis’s work is this relationship to the little, the forgotten, the insignificant, as much as to the important, the essential, to everything that connects us.
Everything is placed on the same level, works of art, teaspoons; nothing dominates and nothing is relegated. It is an intensity of life because these works alter our relationship to reality. They shift things. Then questions arise: What is there? What belongs? What is lost? What concerns us? What do we forget? Is what recedes in time or space lost? Is the person we were in childhood still there, in the body?
Objects, thoughts, images, words come to us, as though it were their destiny. We become targets: “Our eye is a target for the objects before us. It is they that aim at it, not the other way around,” writes Milorad Pavić in Dictionary of the Khazars. And that is what I feel before Adrianna Wallis’s works: as a human being, I am precisely targeted. There is in this work great subtlety, delicacy, intelligence, depth, and also a form of profound violence and love.
— Laura Vazquez